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by chipotle_coyote
4134 days ago
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As an author who cares about typography, I don't think these things are mutually exclusive. Butterick's point here is that Medium takes away your choice on the web, where there's very frequently no separation between author and publisher. That separation doesn't exist if you host your own WordPress or Ghost installation, or on Tumblr or WordPress.com -- but it doesn't really exist if you publish on Medium or Svbtle or the like, either. The difference is that with Medium and similar services, you are acting as your own publisher but letting them act as graphic designer. I understand that a lot of authors don't have the background for this sort of thing, and that LaTeX's basic philosophy here is a good one (i.e., don't screw with the defaults and your paper will look good, and even if you do screw with them you have to put a bit of effort in to start making things look crappy). And Medium will look better than slapping up unstyled HTML.* But that means neither that you necessarily want everything to look like Medium's default -- which, unlike LaTeX, cannot be changed even a whit by authors -- nor that that your choices are only "write with Medium" and "learn professional typography." It's not difficult to slap up a WordPress or Ghost installation and choose from hundreds of themes, many of which have at least reasonable, if not amazing, typesetting standards. Lastly, Butterick's point about Medium's business model is certainly worth paying attention to. |
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*Whenever I talk about how typography matters, I usually get comments (not necessarily on HN) about "content is king" and HTML 2.0 was good enough and how can typesetting possibly matter? Well, sure, content is the most important, but think about an audiobook. It could be read by a professional voice actor, it could be read by the author, and it could be read by your computer's text-to-speech software. Same content each time, barring mispronunciations, but the chances are you'd rather hear the one read by Stephen Fry than the one read by Siri. Typography and graphic design is the visual equivalent. In theory, every print novel could have been reproduced by printing in 12-point Courier and slapping them in three-ring binders, but isn't it nicer that they weren't?